inessential by Brent Simmons

September 2012

Safari Hiding Links Bug

I keep noticing a bug where in some cases Safari will not display a link. I’m not sure when it started, but it’s not new with OS X 10.8.1.

I’ve seen it on this site before.

You can see it in action right now on another site — go to Andrew Sullivan’s weblog. Find the phrase “Christopher Matthews if the Fed will act:” — there’s a missing word and a missing link.

(That’s not the only example on the page.)

Guess it’s time to figure out a reproducible case and file a bug report.

Update 11:20 am Sep. 8, 2012: I could reproduce the bug on two machines. Neither of those machines use any Safari extensions — but they do use a custom style sheet I created for blocking ads. (At least I think I created it. I’m not positive.)

That style sheet had a line like this:

a[href*="feedburner"],

This prevented links that include the text “feedburner” from displaying. Normally this would be okay, except that so many links that come from news readers include ?utm_source=feedburner. So I commented-out that line.

(In case you want to look at my CSS file, it’s here.)